Some Small Catalogues
with Gabby Windey content for the algorithm
Long time! Hello!
I will be in LA for AWP next week! I’m hoping I’ll see some of you writers there; send me a note.
In late April/early May, I’ll be opening some spots for coaching and manuscript evaluation; please get in touch if you’d like to book me.
Who has time for a substack?
The Way I Live Now
For five years I lived with my husband and kids in a nice house with a large yard in a neighborhood with mature trees. I would go on long walks and runs through the neighborhood, down a paved trail and into a lovely park. Now I live with my kids (half the time) at the bottom of that hill, in a nice enough apartment complex directly across from that same park. I’ve come down in the world.
Lately when friends start to talk or even try to joke about what’s happening politically I zone out and think planes are falling from the sky.
I have too much to do. I have always had too much to do. The other day a friend asked me whether I took performance-enhancing drugs. She was joking, but also she was like, how? Because now I am not only working at two precarious jobs and several other gigs but I am also going to graduate school for library and information science. And I have three children. Is it a superpower to be capable at all times of running oneself ragged?
But also something life-affirming swept into my life last weekend and the relief felt like a deep kindness.
I am trying to revive my ambition, the final god of the three once-dear gods I’ve lost my devotion to. So I’ve written a story that made someone cry. I’m working on a story about a political group I was part of in 2017. I’m researching the history of slapstick.
To console myself about the political situation, I read scraps of Adorno.
To console myself, I watch reality game shows like the Traitors.
Heartbreak as Ecstasy
On this season of the Traitors, a woman from the only season of the Bachelor I’ve ever watched, an extremely charming and funny and smart woman—Gabby Windey1—is a contestant. And I suddenly remembered that I had watched that season of the Bachelor during my year of excessive pain and heartbreak as though it really would explain something to me about love. I had forgotten. How the pain was so acute, in that first year of loss, that I felt a breeze could sear my skin. I told a man I dated near the end (or sometime in the middle?) of that time that I thought the feeling of heartbreak was exactly like the feeling of being in love. My sensitivity to everything was overwhelming. The trees were greener than they had ever been. Any person’s kindness unbearably tender2. It was a peak experience—an ecstatic one?3—I lost track of time—there was transcendence in the misery. How was it possible that I got to be alive to experience this?
I look back at this time now glad for what it taught me, and this only means, as it is with childbirth, that I am no longer in pain.
Personal Heartbreak Catalogue
I watched Gabby’s Bachelor season (26) during the last months of my marriage. Each week the teasers promised catastrophe: a woman collapsed, sobbing, on very long set of stairs. I watched this woman (Rachel) process her heartbreak on TV and I said to myself, as though it were both wise and true, “now she has experienced everything it is possible to feel.”
I listened to “Landslide” many times, I’m afraid. Can the child within my heart rise above?
I tried and failed to watch the new version of Scenes from a Marriage. It was too close. Oscar Isaac played a bearded philosophy professor, like my own ex-husband, and I felt near the edge of the cliff as I tried and failed to watch it.
I read Sharon Olds’s poetry collection after her divorce. Stag’s Leap. I love Sharon Olds. I love a heartbreak poem. A friend thought it might give me solace. This book gave me no solace.
the opening of “Unspeakable” by Sharon Olds I watched Mia Hansen-Løve’s film Things to Come with Isabelle Huppert and was so moved by the ending that I listened constantly to “à la claire fontaine” and then the version played here of “Unchained Melody” by the Fleetwoods.
And finally, I read The Unbearable Lightness of Being and felt absolutely harrowed by its final section. I thought of something I’d read in a John Gardner book of writing advice years ago that one must keep in mind that sometimes their readers are going through something wild, like having just had a baby, or a real hardship, like divorce, and so young and so naïve was I then that I thought divorce is a hardship? There is a passage at the end of Unbearable Lightness in which the wife character, in pain but still loving her husband, has a dream about a rabbit she knows represents him. When she holds the animal, she weeps “until blinded by her tears.” Then I underlined this phrase, which had the force of deepest truth, of prophecy, and which I thought I would definitely get tattooed to my body: But for now, she wanted to be alone with her animal.
A Library as a Site for Intellectual Ecstasy
But yeah, I’m trying. I’m trying, as one friend put it, to stay attached to my sincerity. I love library work. I love working on this library degree.
I’ve been thinking about the winter before my teenaged mental breakdown when I worked at the library and kept “rescuing” newspapers and magazines from the recycling bin. I thought maybe given the eternity I’d been promised, I could try to read everything, clip everything, understand everything.
I wanted to share again, then, this piece of memoir I published about five years ago, which I remain very proud of, and about which Joy Castro said “has a library ever been so blatantly erotic, a site for such intellectual ecstasy?”
Now a friend and I exchange Gabby Windey clips on a daily basis.
Some of the most beautiful things that have ever happened to me in my life happened during and after this time.
Do I exaggerate?
Lovely writing, heartbreak is transcendent, so true.
Liz 💕💕